FREE: King of the Confessors

The listing, King of the Confessors has ended.

By Thomas Hoving, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, also author of the national best seller Tunankhamun: The Untold Story." ... This book takes us inside the intrigues of the international art world, and reveals the discovery and acquisition of one of the great treasures of medieval art -- the Bury St Edmund's Cross. The work, an intricately carved ivory cross, known to only a few of the world's art experts, was claimed by the owner, an eccentric and wealthy Yugoslav collector named Ante Topic Mimara, (also well known in the art world to have many obvious fakes in his vast art collection) that this ivory cross came from the renowned Winchester Cathedral in England. The cross, dating from the tenth century is inscribed with the unusual inscription 'Jesus of Nazareth King of the Confessors" rather than the traditional inscription 'Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews'.
On the hunch that such an unusual inscription could not have been placed on a forgery, Hoving begins his pursuit of the enigmatic Topic Mimara and his cross. The chase takes him into the clandestine world of international art dealings: and into a desperate competition with curators from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Cleveland Museum to possess a work of incomparable importance and value, a masterwork so astonishing that it profoundly affects the lives of everyone who comes into contact with it. This is the most exciting story of art acquisition ever told. " The quote is from the book jacket. This book was a 1982 selection of the Episcopal Book Club. Hardbound, intact jacket, unmarked,